OLEAN -- The current U.S. Congress has many qualities that are not endearing,
but one of the worst is its addiction to hidden agendas. Case in point:

In the middle of last week, one short day after the bill had been introduced,
the powerful Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee -- by a
quick, simple voice vote of the full panel -- passed something called the "Biodefense
and Pandemic Vaccine and Drug Development Act of 2005."

It will probably hit the Senate floor this week for a full vote of that august
chamber (and may have already done so by the time you read this). A similar
companion bill is expected to be introduced in the House of Representatives
before week's end. The lobbying lubrication needed in that conservative chamber
to ram it through passage will be even less than in the Senate.

The Senate proposal (S.1873) -- authored and filed by North Carolina Republican
senator Richard Burr, an obedient favorite of the current Bush administration --
sounds innocent and altruistic enough, right?

It would establish an efficient-sounding Biomedical Advanced Research and
Development Agency (BARDA) to speed up and "provide incentives and protections"
for the "domestic manufacture of medical countermeasures" -- vaccines and drugs
-- that would help stop pandemic or epidemic sickness within the United States.

Burr said in introducing the bill that it will simply give the Cabinet-level
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) the "additional authority and
resources to partner with the private sector to rapidly develop drugs and
vaccines."

So, who could be against such a lofty goal? Well, I could, for one. This bill is
a slavering wolverine masquerading as a furry little lab rat.

First of all, whenever you -- as consumers, taxpayers and citizens -- hear any
federal government source saying it wants "to partner with the private sector,"
you should grab your wallet with both hands and hold on tight. In this case, you
should also take your children into your arms. I'm not the only one who's
noticed the danger in this proposal.

Barbara Loe Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC)
-- a private, non-governmental advocacy group pushing for safer vaccines --
calls the Senate bill "a drug company stockholder's dream and a consumer's worst
nightmare."

It is, simply put, a legislative genuflection to Big Pharma -- the
steamroller-powerful drug-making sector of the economy. The pharmaceutical
mega-firms contribute millions to the coffers of congressional members, but if
this is signed into law, they potentially could save billions.

That's because this proposed legislation will strip Americans of the right to a
trial by jury if they are harmed by either an experimental or licensed drug or
vaccine they are forced by the government to take whenever federal health
officials declare a public health emergency.

This bill gives the HHS secretary the sole authority to decide if a drug
manufacturer violated laws that mandate drug safety, and it bans any citizen
from challenging the HHS head's decision in the civil court system. Big Pharma
has been pushing for protection like this for several years. In this millennium,
the angst and sense of loss following 9/11 was manipulated to produce similar
legislative efforts designed to protect drug and vaccine makers even if they
manufactured products that were not properly tested, nor clinically proven safe.

"This proposed legislation," said NVIC's Fisher, "like the power and money grab
by federal health officials and industry in the Homeland Security Act of 2002
and the Project Bioshield Act of 2004, is an unconstitutional attempt by some in
Congress to give a taxpayer-funded handout to pharmaceutical companies for drugs
and vaccines."

Further, Fisher points out, the government, under this bill, "could force all
citizens to use these drugs and vaccines while absolving everyone connected from
any responsibility for injuries and deaths which occur" in their wake.

Sen. Burr is himself the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Bioterrorism and
Public Health Preparedness. In his bill, BARDA -- the new R and D agency
mentioned above -- would be established as the single point of authority in the
federal system for the advanced research and development of vaccines and drugs
in response to bioterrorism and outbreaks of natural disease.

And BARDA would operate in secret.

The agency would be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act and from the
Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires public public transparency --
making it almost certain that no evidence of injuries or deaths caused by drugs
and vaccines labeled as "countermeasures" to bioterrorism or new disease
epidemics would ever become public. The bill would not only provide Big Pharma
impenetrable cover, it would exempt lots of federal cost oversight requirements,
and would forbid government purchases of generic versions of such new drugs or
vaccines, a current practice that saves taxpayers millions of dollars.

The Burr bill means, notes vaccine safety advocate Fisher, "that if an American
is injured by an experimental flu or anthrax vaccine he or she is mandated to
take, that citizen will be banned from exercising the constitutional right to a
jury trial even if it is revealed that the vaccine maker engaged in criminal
fraud and negligence in the manufacture of the vaccine."

Burr himself has acknowledged that "liability exposure" is one of the factors
that has left drug firms "reluctant to invest" in biodefense and influenza
countermeasures.

The timing of the new attempt at congressional protection for Big Pharma -- the
Burr bill -- is exquisite.

The wording "natural outbreaks" of disease and "pandemics" mentioned by Sen.
Burr in his call for support of the bill are designed to make citizens and
fellow senators alike think of one thing -- avian flu.

This new biological "threat" is increasingly on the minds of Americans and is
reaching near-panic level in terms of public perception.

David Daigle, a spokesman for the federal Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, said the CDC has been experiencing an incredible average of 447,000
hits a day on its bird flu information Web site. He pegged the Internet traffic
level "insane."

Americans are avalanching health officials, newspapers, TV stations, their
doctors and other public information sources with anxious questions about
keeping bird-feeders in their back yards, whether they can eat turkey this
Thanksgiving, and whether they should report sightings of dead birds along the
roadside. (You can, you can, you don't have to.)Worried patients are asking
their doctors for Tamiflu, designed to treat ordinary human flu -- not bird flu.

And guess the number of Americans who have died of avian flu already? Zero.

How many human cases of the bird flu have been reported in the United States?
Zero.

That's right, none. The bird flu, which originated in South Korea more than two
years ago, rarely spreads from birds to humans, and hasn't even been shown to
affect poultry yet in this country. Only 120 or so humans have ever come down
with this rare viral strain of influenza -- H5N1 -- and all of them in Asia.
Most of the 60 deaths so far -- 43 -- have occurred in Vietnam. Thailand has the
next largest number of deaths, 13.

The disease in birds is just now reaching eastern Europe through avian
migration. Turkey, Romania, and European Russia have cataloged the dangerous
strain.

The virus might be an eventual threat to the flocks of poultry farmers here, but
many scientists seem to think H5N1 influenza won't sicken or kill humans on a
mass basis unless its mutating properties change dramatically.

Can Senate Democrats stop the passage of Burr's bill? Not bloody likely.

Several Democrats in that chamber have criticized the Burr bill, but mostly from
the perspective that it would do little to provide any response to an avian flu
outbreak.

"I hope that people don't think this is going to solve the problem of the
possible avian flu pandemic that is on our doorstep," warned Sen. Tom Harkin, an
Iowa Democrat.

This legislation is obviously fast-tracked. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist,
the Tennessee Republican, is a co-sponsor, as is Senate Budget Committee
Chairman Judd Gregg, a Republican from New Hampshire.

They obviously don't care that if signed into law, this proposal would eliminate
both legal and regulatory safeguards, applied to vaccines and drugs, that need
strengthening, not weakening or elimination. They obviously don't care if
children or adults harmed by vaccines and drugs will have to forfeit their right
to present a case in front of a jury in a civil court of law.

Don't think this never happens. The Food and Drug Administration is legally
responsible at present for regulating Big Pharma, and for ensuring that vaccines
and drugs released to the public are safe and effective. Drug companies
marketing pain-killer and anti-depressants that have injured thousands are being
held accountable in civil courts all the time. And the FDA has come under
intense criticism for keeping information from the American public about drug
dangers.

For almost two decades, vaccine makers have already been protected from most
liability in civil courts through the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of
1986 and a concurrent compensation program that offers victims an alternative to
civil courts. That program has already awarded almost $2 billion to injured
victims of mandated vaccines -- yet two-thirds of the plaintiffs are turned away
from such compensation through vigorous defense of the manufacturers by Justice
Department lawyers.

"The drug companies and doctors got all the liability protection they needed in
1986," says Fisher of the NVIC, "but they are greedy and want more."

She continues: "It's a sad day for this nation when Congress is frightened and
bullied into allowing one profit-making industry to destroy the Seventh
Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing citizens their day in court in front
of a jury of their peers."

Amen to that.

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John Hanchette, a professor of journalism at St. Bonaventure University, is a
former editor of the Niagara Gazette and a Pulitzer Prize-winning national
correspondent. He was a founding editor of USA Today and was recently named by
Gannett as one of the Top 10 reporters of the past 25 years. He can be contacted
via e-mail at Hanchette6@aol.com.

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Dawn Richardson
PROVE(Parents Requesting Open Vaccine Education)prove@vaccineinfo.net (email)http://vaccineinfo.net/ (web site)
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